DISCOURSE

mination over these Islands, than to the Spaniards that which they have acquired over

" to run toward Guinea, when they landed
" at Ylo. But the third and convincing [reason],
" is that we and our comrades must have
" passed over this new Land, following
" the longitude where it was placed in
" the manuscript Map; and that it is morally
" impossible that no ship would have had
" knowledge of it, being about 50 leagues long
" E. S. E. and W. N. W. Thus there remains
" no longer any room to doubt that it was the
" Northern part of the New Islands, of which time
" will discover the Western part, which is still
" unknown.
" These Islands are without doubt the same as those
" Sir Richard Hawkins discovered in
" 1593, being East of the Desert Coast, at
" 50 degrees. He was driven, by a storm,
" onto an unknown Land; he ran along
" this Island about 60 leagues, and saw
" fires, which made him judge that it was
" inhabited."

I only transcribe this long text from Frezier Amédée-François Frézier (1682–1773), a French engineer and explorer who mapped the coasts of South America. in order to have the opportunity to place the judicious remarks of Dom Pernetty Antoine-Joseph Pernety (1716–1796), a Benedictine monk and naturalist who accompanied Bougainville to the Falklands. who rectifies it.

It must be observed regarding this Poré of St. Malo A captain from the French port of Saint-Malo, from which the name "Malouines" is derived. of whom Frezier speaks, that this Captain did

PRELIMINARY.

half of the New World.
Since the first discovery

not know the exact situation of the coasts of the
Patagonians PatagonsThe name given by early explorers to the indigenous people of Patagonia, famously described as giants in early travelogues., nor that of the Malouine Islands The Falkland Islands., because he
had calculated his position poorly. In fact, these Islands
are only 90 or 100 leagues from the Strait of Ma-
gellan: how then could they have been dis-
tant by 100 leagues to the West of the coast of
the Assumption, so named by Poré? If
he had had knowledge of the position of the
Malouine Islands, he would have seen clearly, by the lati-
tude and the longitude of the coast he was traversing,
that it could be none other than that of these
Islands.

Let us remark in the second place that the estimate
of Mr. Gobien of the Saint-Jean is erroneous,
since he places this coast of the Assumption South
of the Rio de la Plata; and since Dom Pernetty
having landed there like him, and at the same lo-
cation according to Frezier's Map, his estimate
gave him about 64 and a half degrees of West lon-
gitude, meridian of Paris; and
the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, 56° 30"; which
places the location of the coast where the two Na-
vigators landed, 8 degrees further to the South-
West; and accounts for nearly the error that the Author
of the Voyage of Admiral Anson (page 78), attri-